Several systems for digital communication with portable devices have been described. For example in an article entitled Cordless Personal Communications by a Dr W. Tuttlebee and published in the IEEE Communications Magazine of December 1992 at pages 42-53, various systems for digital cordless telephony are discussed. Much of such activity has taken place in Europe where several wireless data standards have emerged in recent years, such as the CT2, CT3 and DECT standards.
The principal function of such standards is to enable digital communication from a central control connected to telephone company lines to transfer calls to and from portable devices that may be at any location within a building. Standard cellular systems cannot adequately serve such function because of the long distance range of cellular RF signals and the need to accommodate a large number of simultaneous communications within a relatively small volume such as a building.
These wireless standards have been adopted so that both data and speech signals can be sent over RF frequencies between a central radio exchange and a large number of portable devices. These standards employ a time division multiple access/time division duplex/multiple carrier (TDMA/TDD/MC) approach. More simply put, digital signals to or from the radio exchange unit are sent in time slots. The communication thus occurs in frame signals of say twenty milliseconds long, with the time frame divided into say ten uplink or transmit slots followed by the same number of ten down link or receive slots. Each slot being one millisecond long. Each portable unit must respond to a signal addressed to it in one of the uplink slots in a corresponding downlink slot in the same frame signal.
In a radio frequency application of such a cordless digital communication system the number of simultaneous communications is limited by the number of available slots. If there are say ten slots, then for any one particular carrier frequency only ten telephone signals can be carried. In order to increase the capacity of the system additional carrier frequencies are employed typically about eight. Hence, for each cell, formed of a radio exchange unit, a total of eighty active telephone communications can be carried out.
These standard systems are designed to accommodate higher transmission requirements to and from any one portable unit by assigning additional slots, in which case the number of available slots for other portable devices is reduced. Furthermore, the RF communications are difficult to limit to specific areas within a particular building so that care must be taken that carrier frequencies in one cell do not interfere with those in another cell. For example, if such RF system is set up to operate communications on adjacent floors of a multistoried building, then a similar system on other floors must use sufficiently different carrier frequencies to avoid RF interference problems. Since the available RF carrier bandwidths tend to be limited, because of FCC or other governmental spectrum allocations, a need exists to enable practically unlimited digital cordless communications without interference problems.
Infrared communication systems are well known, see for example the U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,553,267; 4,757,553; 4,977,619; 5,103,108; 5,319,191 and 5,351,149 to Crimmins. In the '619 patent a communication system is described wherein a base unit is hard wire connected to a plurality of stationary infrared transmitter and receiver (R/T) units distributed in an enclosure. An infrared portable unit can communicate with anyone of the RFT units to establish a two way communication link with the base unit.
A need exists to accommodate standards for RF or cordless telephone communications to infrared communications so that a large number of telephone connections can be made at the same time within a cell without interference problems in a reliable manner.